Online research sources such as Facebook, Twitter, blogs, chat rooms, discussion forums, and other social networking sites will be treated as publicly available data by the IRB in a very broad sense, and with a number of limitations.

Privacy Statements & Terms of Use

You are responsible for checking the privacy statement and terms of use of any site being used for research purposes. You must adhere to the written policies of any site used for research. The IRB expects that researchers will either: 1) obtain consent to use data from an individual’s social media page or 2) make an appropriate argument as part of the application process as to why the IRB should waive consent for the purposes of the project.

Publicly Available

The IRB does not consider sites that require the user to create an account, and then provide a log in and password, to be publicly available data. Therefore, participants must be consented before an investigator can observe or interact with participants in these online environments. Members of sites that require a log in have an expectation of privacy and do not expect that anything they post will be used for research purposes. In some circumstances, researchers can petition the IRB for a waiver of consent. In these situations, researchers will need to provide an appropriate argument/justification as to why a waiver of consent is appropriate.

Not Human Subjects Research

Some technology-based studies may not meet the definition of human subjects research per the federal regulations, and therefore not require IRB review. An example would be if a researcher is studying how many Facebook pages include images of families; the unit of measure in this case is the page, and not a human subject.

Identifiable Information

Research using public documents such as newspapers, books, or journals published online and that involve no other data source(s) is not considered human research. However, projects that combine identifiable information about individuals obtained from public documents, with identifiable information obtained from other sources, may be considered human research.

Data Mining

Facebook, Twitter, and others may provide data mining services where their developers will mine data from the site, for a fee, at the researcher’s request. Depending on the scope, the IRB may treat the data differently because data collection would be done by the media site and (likely) provided to the researcher without direct identifiers. The IRB deals with this type of research activity on a case-by-case basis.